An Unfolding of William Blake's "The Chimney Sweeper."
William Blake's poem "The Chimney Sweeper" gives us a look into the unfortunate lives of 18th century London boys whose primary job was to clear chimneys of the soot that accumulated on its interior; boys that were named "climbing boys" or "chimney sweepers." Blake, a professional engraver, wrote this poem (aabb rhyme), in the voice of a young boy, an uneducated chimney sweeper. This speaker is obviously a persona, a fictitious character created by Blake, as it is apparent that he wasn't a child or a chimney sweeper at the time he wrote this poem.
The Chimney Sweeper is divided in six stanzas; the first stanza of this narrative poem starts off with the young chimney sweeper, the persona, explaining naively his cause for being a climbing boy. It is widely known in history that the chimney sweepers used to announce their service by bellowing the word "Sweep!" on streets so when we read this first stanza it is deduced that this boy was sold by his father to a master sweep at the time that he could not have been older than 6 years old. In the third verse the boy says that his tongue "could scarcely cry " `weep! `weep! `weep! `weep!" ", meaning that he did not have the ability to speak such a word. He was obliged to start working and to live in inhuman conditions; for when Blake wrote "and in soot I sleep", he again was precise. Chimney sweepers sometimes endured more than 3 months without cleaning themselves, having to be forced to sleep in the soot of the chimneys they had cleaned.
In the second stanza we are introduced to another chimney sweeper named Tom Dacre "who cried when his head that curled like a lamb's back was shaved." He is not only crying for the loss of ...
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...imney Sweeper" might be considered, in part, a very religious poem as an angel (a representative of God), gives relief to these poor children in the form of a dream.
The last fragment of the poem: "Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm; so if all do their duty, they need not fear harm." Their duties, as I have stated before, were to clean chimneys of soot. In the process of cleaning these chimneys a lot of climbing boys never got to the stage of adolescence as some died of suffocation, of cancer, etc, all caused by their work. Why was Tom "happy and warm"? Why did they "need not fear harm"? Tom knew his dream foreshadowed happiness in the next life so he was happy, he was warm, and he "need not fear harm."
Works Cited
Blake, William "The Chimney Sweeper." Literature. An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama 9th ed. Pearson Longman. 739.
through the pile of ashes that once used to be his poems. This part of the poem symbolizes
Starting with the first stanza, Blake creates a dark and depressing tone. He uses words such as died, weep, soot, and cry to support this tone. In the first two lines the child shares his family with us, stating his mother’s death and the fact that his father sold him sharing that the child must come from a poor background “When my mother died I was very young, And my father sold me while yet my tongue”(Lines 1-2). The image of a poor child getting tossed into another unhappy place sets the tone for the beginning of this poem. Blake uses the word “weep”, instead of “sweep” in the first stanza to show the innocence of the child “Could scarcely cry weep weep weep weep”(3). The fact that the child cried “weep” instead of sweep shows that the child could not be any older than four. Blake describes that they sleep in soot also meaning they are sleeping in their death bed. The average life span of children who work in chimneys is ten years due to the harsh work environment. The child portrays sorrow in the last line of the first stanza “So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.”(4)
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At first glance, one may not fully comprehend that Elie is utilizing the aforementioned metaphor to convey much more than just the meaning behind the word “chimney” (Wiesel 39). In fact, he is attempting
This final verse explains what Tom says when he is leaving the family so that they don’t have an extra mouth to feed. When he leaves, after killing a second man, he tells his mom that he plans to carry on Casy’s plans of unionization. He says that he will be everywhere that the migrant farm workers, his people, are starving and being treated unfairly.
Therefore, Oliver’s incorporation of imagery, setting, and mood to control the perspective of her own poem, as well as to further build the contrast she establishes through the speaker, serves a critical role in creating the lesson of the work. Oliver’s poem essentially gives the poet an ultimatum; either he can go to the “cave behind all that / jubilation” (10-11) produced by a waterfall to “drip with despair” (14) without disturbing the world with his misery, or, instead, he can mimic the thrush who sings its poetry from a “green branch” (15) on which the “passing foil of the water” (16) gently brushes its feathers. The contrast between these two images is quite pronounced, and the intention of such description is to persuade the audience by setting their mood towards the two poets to match that of the speaker. The most apparent difference between these two depictions is the gracelessness of the first versus the gracefulness of the second. Within the poem’s content, the setting has been skillfully intertwined with both imagery and mood to create an understanding of the two poets, whose surroundings characterize them. The poet stands alone in a cave “to cry aloud for [his] / mistakes” while the thrush shares its beautiful and lovely music with the world (1-2). As such, the overall function of these three elements within the poem is to portray the
In a dream the boy has an “Angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy, he’d have God for his father, and never want joy” (Blake 19-20). This gives the boy the motivation that he needs to continue his life and so as he awoke, he “was happy and warm; / [and] if [he did his] duty [he] need not fear harm” (Blake 23-24). The young boy decides to suffer through his brutal everyday life so that one day he can go to heaven, where he will be happy. These two polar opposite approaches to dealing with the misfortune of the characters is what shapes both the theme and tone of the poems. Another similarity between these two poems is their extensive use of imagery.
Poe utilizes a gradual change in diction as the poem progresses. Initially, he begins the poem with melancholic diction when the narrator is falling asleep: “while I pondered, weak and weary,” “nodded, nearly napping,” and “of someone gently rapping” (1-4). The utilization of alliteration in these lines supply a song-like rhythm, which is soothing to the reader. This usage of diction conveys a mellow tone. Further into the poem, when the increasingly agitated narrator becomes vexed at the raven, he lashes out at the bird. Here, he states, “Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore! / Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! / Leave my loneliness unbroken!--quit the bust above my door! / Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!” (98-101). Here, his uses archaic words and phrases such as “thee,” “Night’s Plutonian shore,” and “thy soul hath”. This usage of unorthodox language creates a theatrical, dramatic, and climactic effect, which leads to an impassioned tone. By presenting both tones, Poe is able to show the contrast between the two. This transformation from a tone that is mellow to one of frustration and anxiety represents the spiraling downward of the narrator’s mental state.
The theme of authority is possibly the most important theme and the most popular theme concerning William Blake’s poetry. Blake explores authority in a variety of different ways particularly through religion, education and God. Blake was profoundly concerned with the concept of social justice. He was also profoundly a religious man. His dissenting background led him to view the power structures and legalism that surrounded religious establishments with distrust. He saw these as unwarranted controls over the freedom of the individual and contrary to the nature of a God of liberty. Figures such as the school master in the ‘schoolboy’, the parents in the ‘chimney sweeper’ poems, the guardians of the poor in the ‘Holy Thursday’, Ona’s father in ‘A Little girl lost’ and the priestly representatives of organised religion in many of the poems, are for Blake the embodiment of evil restriction.
There are a couple of similes the author uses in the poem to stress the helplessness she felt in childhood. In the lines, “The tears/ running down like mud” (11,12), the reader may notice the words sliding down the page in lines 12-14 like mud and tears that flowed in childhood days. The speaker compares a...
The diction helps exemplify the imagery even better, the reader can sense how the speaker’s home felt like as well as the father’s hard work. The speaker awakens to the "splintering, breaking" of the coldness. This allows the audience to feel a sense of how cold it was in the speaker’s house. One can infer that the poem is set in a cold city or town during the winter, which gives the reader an idea of how cold it might be. “Slowly I would rise and dress, fearing the chronic angers of that house,” represents how the father battles to keep the family away from harm of the cold and darkness, implying that the speaker grew up in poverty. His father’s “cracked hands” shows how hard his father worked to keep his family safe.
As the first poem in the book it sums up the primary focus of the works in its exploration of loss, grieving, and recovery. The questions posed about the nature of God become recurring themes in the following sections, especially One and Four. The symbolism includes the image of earthly possessions sprawled out like gangly dolls, a reference possibly meant to bring about a sense of nostalgia which this poem does quite well. The final lines cement the message that this is about loss and life, the idea that once something is lost, it can no longer belong to anyone anymore brings a sense...
Stanza one is a ballad that uses symbolism as a technique, ‘grinned at life in empty joy’, this symbolises the boys’ youth when he was pleased by anything, and life was easy, he had no worries, as he would grin at anything. This phrase gives an outlook at life before joining the war, it is demonstrating the boys’ life when he was contented with anything. Another symbol is found in the first stanza, ‘whistled early with the lark’. The phrase suggests the boys’ youth in the early days, oblivious to the future laying ahead oh him. The lark symbolises cheerfulness and the beginning of the day. The boy whistling with the lark shows how he is excited for every new
A specific example of a man who tosses three girls out the window and then plunges to his own death serves to show us the horror of the situation. the poem then continues on to tell us of in humane conditions in Scotland. It ends by telling us about the slaves who picked and planted the cotton. The speaker seems to be telling us a story in order to inform us of what's going on in the shirt industry.Robert Pinsky doesn't have many obvious examples of diction in his work, although hints of it can be found. There is a simile in the first line of the tenth stanza.
In the poem, “The Chimney Sweeper” by William Blake, the author attempts to educate the reader about the horrors experienced by young children who are forced into labor at an early age cleaning chimneys for the wealthy. The poem begins with a young boy who has lost his mother but has no time to properly grieve because his father has sold him into a life of filth and despair. The child weeps not only for the loss of his mother and father’s betrayal, but also for the loss of his childhood and innocence. Blake uses poetry in an attempt to provoke outrage over the inhumane and dangerous practice of exploiting children and attempts to shine a light on the plight of the children by appealing to the reader’s conscience in order to free the children from their nightmare existence. Right away in the first lines of the poem we learn through the child narrator that his life is about to change dramatically for the worse.